A couple of thoughts on Silksong.
Hello you wonderfully wonderful Patreon people!
I hope that all of you are doing greater than great, that all your Super Mario Maker levels get a sudden burst of lovely comments and that you get lots of Süßes and little Saures tonight. (which means lots of treats and little tricks in English.)
The Bananza goldless video and the 10 year Mario Maker anniversary video are out and I’m quite happy with how both of them turned out
We are actually going to have a bit of a Mario Maker focus over the next couple of weeks - the next two videos will be about Super Mario Maker as well, because of a fun little story.
You see, Psycrow actually reached out to me a while ago and challenged me to attempt to upload a level that the wonderful folks of the team 0% can’t beat.
That’s a really interesting challenge because to pull this off we not only need to come up with a completely impossible Super Mario Maker level, but we also can’t violate Nintendo’s terms of service - which means we have to find a way to make an impossible level without using glitches.
So tinkering around with this idea sent me down the deepest rabbit holes in all of the mushroom kingdom and beyond - but I think I finally found a way to at least annoy the wonderful people at team 0% a little bit.
It’s probably the most nerdy thing I’ve ever attempted on YouTube - we are literally going to attempt to make a level impossible by creating an NP complete problem using the blinking animation of a clown car’s eye while also retracing the entire history of cryptography.
It’s going to be fun!
But since we will be focused on Mario Maker for the next couple of weeks it also means that we aren’t going to talk about much else which brings us to the topic of today's silly little patreon update.
Silky Song!
It’s going to take a while until I get to making a big video about Silksong but I suspect that a lot of you are interested in my thoughts on the game so I thought I’d do a quick write up on a couple of aspects of the game for all you wonderful people here.
There will be light Silksong spoilers from here on.
Awesome, so let’s start with the most important question in all of Silksong.
Is Silksong the better Hollow Knight or is Hollow Knight the better Silksong?
And the answer is a very concrete: I dunno.
Here’s the problem.
I struggle to know whether I enjoyed playing Silksong more than I enjoyed playing Hollow Knight because of a really strange quality of Hollow Knight.
You see, my first playthrough of Hollow Knight was not the playthrough I enjoyed the most.
The first time I played Hollow Knight I didn’t even play it to the true ending.
My first time through the game I stopped playing after beating the Hollow Knight.
At that point I just felt satisfied and dropped the game after.
However, I ended up coming back to the game a couple of months later.
I restarted the whole thing from the very beginning and this time I played it until the very final boss fight.
This second playthrough ended up being vastly more enjoyable to me than my first one.
And that has actually been true for every time I’ve beaten the game since.
For whatever reason I just seem to enjoy Hollow Knight more and more the more I play it, which is quite unusual but a huge reason why I love the game so much.
Which brings us back to the problem that I can’t tell whether I enjoyed Silksong more than Hollow Knight.
You see, I did enjoy my first playthrough of Silksong more than I enjoyed my first playthrough of Hollow Knight - however I also enjoyed my latest Hollow Knight playthrough more than I did enjoy Silksong.
Hollow Knight is just a game that grew on me the more I played it and I just don’t know yet if Silksong will be a similar grower!
I’m really curious to see how much I enjoy the game once I come back to it in a couple of months.
What I can already say with absolute certainty however, is that there are tons of things in Silksong that are stunning and that the game is far more polished than Hollow Knight ever was.
The combat is incredibly tight, the enemy designs are ridiculously clever, there isn’t a single boss fight that doesn’t deliver (except Groal, who I hope dies a slow and painful death), the art is amazing, the world is beautiful and mysterious, there are tons of secrets to find and there is an incredible lore to dig into.
Especially the lore of the world and the themes it touches on are a lot more developed than anything ever was in the Hollow Knight.
Everything in Silksong is just polished to an almost ridiculous degree.
However, this polish also kind of got me wondering, if it is possible for a game to be too polished.
Everything in Silk Song is so developed and so wonderfully completed that I sometimes wonder if the game lost a bit of a rough-around-the-edgesness that the original Hollow Knight had and that added to its charm.
Take how the sword upgrades are unlocked in Silk Song in comparison to Hollow Knight.
In Hollow Knight the pale ores that upgrade our weapon are not terribly difficult to obtain.
A couple of them are hidden behind early tests of end game activities, like the one hidden behind the second level of the colosseum of fools, the one hidden behind finding 300 dream essences or the one hidden behind finding 31 of the 46 grubs in the game.
And a couple of them are just hidden behind normal exploration - like the one hidden at the peak of Hollownest.
In Hollow Knight pale ore is just a normal reward for exploring - getting it isn’t terribly difficult.
In Silksong however this is very different.
Obtaining the weapon upgrades in Silksong is hidden behind incredibly long and honestly quite epic quest chains.
One upgrade is naturally obtained during story progression and one is hidden within the citadel in a similar way to how upgrades were hidden in Hollow Knight - the other two upgrades however.
Oh dear!
One pale oil is obtained by doing a very long and complicated quest chain requiring us to find five different dishes that are hidden behind tricky platforming challenges, sophisticated set pieces, dangerous delivery missions and dangerous optional boss fights.
The other one is even crazier!
It not only requires us to find every single flea that are hidden all over Silk Song’s map but it also requires us to beat three difficult (and fun) minigames once we found all fleas to finally get the upgrade.
Every single step in those weapon upgrade quest chains is enjoyable in itself (but the delivery mission for which I wish a similar fate as I do for Groal).
The quests are really well crafted, however … it’s just … you know … the questchains are just really big and complicated.
The weapon upgrades however are almost mandatory.
I very much enjoyed doing those quests the first time, however I'm not sure if I’ll enjoy redoing them on every consecutive playthrough in the future.
Nothing in those quests is bad, but the fact that they are so long and so fleshed out completely changes the process of getting an upgrade in comparison to Hollow Knight.
I kinda wonder if they overdid it.
There was a certain simplicity to obtaining the weapon upgrades in Hollow Knight that I quite liked.
For example: I know that I can simply obtain a weapon upgrade as soon as I reach the Colosseum of Fools - something that allows me to plan my playthroughs around it.
Silksong lost some of this simplicity by being so stunningly polished.
I kinda wonder if this insane polish is going to hurt my enjoyment of the game in future playthroughs and whether there was some magic to Hollow Knights simplicity that the sequel lost to some degree.
But I can’t really tell if this is going to be the case, because I haven’t replayed Silksong yet.
What I do feel more confident in commenting on however is the very question that had the entire internet up in flames the weeks after the games release.
Is Silksong too difficult or is the playerbase just not worthy of Silksong?
And the answer is - at least in my humble avocado - that Silksong is roughly as difficult as Hollow Knight was.
And that is a problem.
Because Hollow Knight featured an easy mode while Silksong does not.
Which brings us back to the weapon upgrades.
Upgrading our weapon in those games is an unbelievable buff to our character.
Every single upgrade makes the entire game noticeable easier.
Every single weapon upgrade reduces the difficulty of the game.
Take the Mantis Lords fight in Hollow Knight.
Beating them without a weapon upgrade is tough as nails.
Beating them with three upgrades is almost trivial.
Every single weapon upgrade noticeably reduces the difficulty.
And Silksong and Hollow Knight noticeably differ in how those difficulty reducing upgrades are handed out.
Because Hollow Knight allowed us to get the upgrades early, while Silksong does not.
If we went out of our way in Hollow Knight to get a couple of upgrades early then the entire mid-game was just a lot easier.
I suspect that lots of people got through their first Hollow Knight playthrough by looking up where the weapon upgrades are and playing through most of the game while being a bit ahead of the difficulty curve. (I certainly did during my first playthrough.)
The fact that it was possible to get ahead of the game's difficulty curve was incredibly healthy for the game.
It resulted in an in-game system that naturally gave the players as much power as they actually needed to beat the challenges of the game.
My first time through the game I really needed all the upgrades - nowadays I usually don’t even get the last couple of ores.
Hollow Knights weapon upgrades are a wonderful invisible difficulty slider that is naturally hidden within the game.
And this difficulty slider is missing in Silksong.
There are barely any optional weapon upgrades hidden in the game and the few upgrades that we can get early are so unbelievably complicated to obtain that it is actually easier to get them as intended.
Even worse, the upgrades are pretty much mandatory.
If we only get one or two upgrades over the course of the game then the health scaling of the enemies gets ridiculous.
If we are behind the curve then enemies in the final act take as many hits as some bosses in Hollow Knight did.
So if we skip an upgrade Silksong becomes unreasonably difficult while at the same time not allowing us to get ahead of the scaling which results in … well, the result is that Hollow Knights organic difficulty slider is gone.
Silksong lacks the organic difficulty adaptation that made Hollow Knight flow so naturally.
I really think there should have been one or even two more optional weapon upgrades in the game.
Optional weapon upgrades that would have made it possible for people to outscale the challenges if they were struggling early on.
There is even an obvious place where such an early upgrade could have been hidden - the top of the hunters march area.
Hunter’s March is a difficult early game area that is completely optional.
If we were rewarded with an additional weapon upgrade for beating it early it would have probably helped a lot of people that were struggling with the game, without it feeling unearned, given how difficult it is to make it through this area early.
The lack of optional weapon upgrades is at the core of the whole Silksong is too difficult tango that the internet was dancing after the game’s release.
In my opinion that’s the biggest stumble of the game.
So what are my overall thoughts about the Silksong?
Well, I really don’t know!
The game is incredible on tons of layers and overall I loved my time with it.
However I am not sure whether I will end up loving the game as much as I loved Hollow Knight, because I don’t know yet how enjoyable the game is on repeated playthroughs.
So my final score for Silksong is 30 flees out of 46 grubs.
Hooray!
We will probably return to Silksong at some point next year and dive into it in much more detail but for now those are my early thoughts on it.
Before we wrap this little update up - as always - a gigantic thank you to all of you incredible people for your generous support.
I currently couldn’t do all of that without you - a huge thank you for that!
Expect the next update after the two Mario Maker videos, lot’s of hugs! <3
Comments (9)
A good thing to note on the Silksong damage upgrades is that, unlike HK where your weapon does a flat amount of damage added with a few exceptions, Silksong upgrades your damage but also decreases it by some percent that's different for each enemy. It's why one enemy may take 2 swings instead of 3 from before the upgrade and another might still take 5. I feel that HK made you feel very powerful and I love that incremental build in a metroidvania, but Silksong doesn't want to make any enemies into "throw-aways".
Okay, I gotta say I am HYPED about the Mario Maker videos. Very curious about what you found this time. Also, I really need to play Hollow Knight and Skong once I can spare the money.
I think this is the most well-thought out take I've seen on silksong's difficulty so far, very excited for the full video whenever it happens.
Oh, by the way, YOU already have an unbeatable level in Levelhead, Ceave. Since you built it super early on, an update changed bumper behavior so it's not possible to win anymore.
Only got Levelhead levels. The fancy Halloween boss did get a sudden burst of stats from speedrunning, actually. And we got no shortage of low-effort cryptographically impossible "code levels"... I find Silksong's difficulty discussion interesting, but also wish it didn't massively overshadow all other conversation topics about the game. It does so many cool things for exploration and storytelling that I wish more games took notes from, but it's all buried beneath the difficulty debate. For that reason alone I wish there was a "Story Mode" like Nine Sols. It didn't ruin that game's difficulty experience, so it shouldn't ruin Silksong's either. There is a second reason though. The act 2 final boss is so insanely easy compared to the others, it feels like the game is confused about what difficulty it wants to be. If it wanted to let casual players achieve an ending, it already failed in act 1. If it wanted to be exclusively for those who persevere, it's very anticlimactic. I also wish for a Story Mode so that the devs are free to design the challenge however they want. On the weapon upgrades, I also hear that they feel way overtuned for seasoned players, and getting them makes bosses too easy. But casual players think Hornet deals too little damage, yet the upgrades take more effort to obtain. (as a side note, I expect the food quest will feel a lot less taxing in subsequent playthroughs) I think this is part of a larger trend, where Silksong's "difficulty modifiers" are aimed at mid-level players rather than casual. Tools make combat easier, so long as you can handle the extra complexity and resource management. Mask shards are backloaded, meaning you have 5-6 masks for all of Act 1, a significant portion of the game. Put simply, I think the skill floor is much higher to even benefit from the options the game gives you. If you pass that check, you can feel downright overpowered using them. If not, you don't have much recourse other than modding the game to be easier, something few casuals would do.
I recall some other level creators used a cypher to make a nearly-impossible MM level, but this was bypassed by people who hacked their Switches so they could see downloaded levels in the editor. Do you have a plan for a level that can't be cracked even in the editor?
Yeah, that level was probably "It Rhymes With Toad". I think I have an idea that makes it impossible to solve the level even using a cracked editor - though they probably figure something out anyway.
That Mario Maker video sounds really fun. I do hope you can eventually get back to doing Ceave Perspective videos, though. I'm itching for a meaty one. Any chance for an analysis of The Witness at some point pretty please with a cherry on top?
We will probably be back at doing more meaty Perspective vids early next year! The Witness is a super interesting game that is certainly on my list - we'll probably assemble the overview committee and have another vote on the topic though!